Conventional wireline voice systems, commonly referred to as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), as well as early wireless systems, such as the Advanced Mobile Phone Services (AMPS) used in the United States, provide a fixed communications path between the message source and the destination. This fixed circuit switching technique establishes a dedicated connection or allocation of system resources, i.e., a radio channel between a base station and mobile terminal, and a dedicated connection between the associated mobile switching center and the PSTN, for the entire duration of the call. Although such dedicated connections are useful in maintaining voice communications, which generally involve the transfer of a continuous stream of voice data which lasts for a relatively long period of time, circuit switching is not very efficient for data communications, particularly wireless data communications, because the short, bursty data transmissions are often followed by lengthy periods of inactivity, resulting in a waste of resources.
With the proliferation of computers, facsimiles, electronic mail (e-mail), short messaging and other services, the transmission of data, particularly in packet form, is becoming more prevalent. In an effort to provide a more efficient network framework for wireline data transmission, the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) was developed to complement the PSTN and provide improved data services between network nodes and end-users.
Several prior art solutions currently exist for interconnecting wireless communication networks and wireline networks. Some of these prior art solutions include computer processor-based gateways. However computer processor-based gateways are slow compared to the parallel processing capabilities of network processor-based gateways. Even further, the addition of multiple CPUs in a computer processor-based gateway to allow for parallel processing Will increase the cost of the gateway substantially.
What is needed is a network processor-based gateway for efficiently and effectively interconnecting wireless and wireline networks.